In 1965, twenty years after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Japanese photographer Kikuji Kawada published his debut series The Map, a highly metaphorical contemplation of Japan’s collective war memory. The work had a sensational impact on photography and defined the artist’s early style. Since then, Kawada has continued to stimulate our senses with his vivid, original, and foreboding images.
This exhibition brings together three of Kawada’s series: the aforementioned The Map, a highly symbolic work about Japan in the years immediately following the war; The Last Cosmology, which captures Japan between the end of the Showa period and the end of the millennium; and Los Caprichos, a series begun during the economic boom years and recently revived by the artist. While all three series have previously been presented separately, this is the first time they have been brought together in a single venue for an exhibition spanning sixty-five years of the artist’s work.
How does the time and world depicted by Kawada, the logic of which is a product of his highly personal perspective, synchronise with the world of the viewer?
The word ‘source,’ the theme of this year’s KYOTOGRAPHIE, in addition to referring to origins and causes, also has the meaning of obtaining something. Kawada, whose late style sourced an ‘invisible map,’ continues to capture the catharsis of an ever-changing modern world, using the medium of photography to freely move back and forth between time and place in pursuit of a comprehensive view of ‘this time, this place.
Born in Ibaraki, Japan in 1933. He joined Shinchosha in 1955. He became a freelance photographer and co-founded the VIVO collective in 1959 together with Eikoh Hosoe, Ikko Narahara, Shomei Tomatsu, Akira Sato, and Akira Tanno. In 1965 he released The Map, a groundbreaking photobook loaded with postwar political metaphor, and he continues to challenge our intellect with similarly fresh and clairvoyant images to this day. Kawada describes his work as “an expression of a specific scene in time and my relationship to it, framed accordingly, and the style born from the exchange.” These days Kawada can be found posting images and photographic musings to his Instagram account.
